Victoria, the roles you’ve played are very emotionally, psychologically complex characters. How different was it getting into the character of Dani, and was it also physically demanding for you?
Victoria: It was very different. It was physically demanding. I don’t think I had prepared for that so much. The first season wasn’t physically demanding. But this one, there’s that there’s a lot of action. I’m running around after these children and the ghosts all the time. And so I didn’t quite anticipate that. So I didn’t really prepare for it, I just kind of did it. And it hurt. [Laughs]
Henry, your character is influenced by the uncle in ‘The Turn of The Screw’ and for the alter ego party, those influenced by ‘The Jolly Corner.’ How did you cohesively portray these two into one character for the series?
Henry: It was a choice to play the alter ego, shadow Henry as being very slick and very clean, and very crisp, and much more together than the real Henry. And to gradually show the weak becoming stronger and strong become weak or vice versa. But it was an interesting choice that was already written into the script anyway, so as far as I was concerned, I just had to make a couple of decisions with the turn of the line, but that was as far as it went.
With ‘The Turn of The Screw,’ you’re supposed to sort of question the sanity of a lot of the characters. With Bly Manor was it also a question that you had to answer in your heads or discussed with Mike before you went in? Or was it sort of left kind of ambiguous? Like how much of what they’re seeing is real, and what is just all in their heads?
Victoria: Yeah, there was definitely an understanding of what was actually happening and what what was a figment of their imagination. That was all laid out very clearly.
Henry: Yeah. The only ghosts that you see are really at Bly.
Did both of you feel any pressure that this is a follow up to Hill House?
Victoria: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of pressure going on to the second season of a show. You want to live up to expectations and you might even want to exceed those expectations. Or completely subvert those expectations. But you certainly don’t want to bore people, and you don’t want to disappoint them. So there is a lot of pressure there.
Henry: Yeah, I agree. You don’t want to disappoint the fans, and there are a lot of fans of of Hill House. It’s a bit of an ask for the fans that we’re creating a new world and totally new characters for them to view now after getting so engrossed with the Crain family. But but the Crains’ story is told and really there’s nowhere to go from there. So Bly is the new frontier.
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All episodes of The Haunting of Bly Manor are now available on Netflix.
